Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this piece, Elizabeth Harris, a Metro reporter on the education beat, explains why she spent several months sitting in tiny plastic chairs.

When I started covering education in New York City at the beginning of the 2014-15 school year, one of the first things that struck me was how schools cobbled together a little extra here and there for their students who were homeless — and how often that came up.

At a high school in the Bronx, supplies were set aside for homeless kids in one section of a walk-in closet. At an elementary school in Brooklyn, bags packed with food were laid out on a Friday afternoon for students who were not likely to get enough to eat over the weekend. And at a school in Manhattan, a principal told me how accommodating children from nearby shelters caused her student roster to pinball up and down, and her teachers just had to adjust.

There have never been more homeless people in New York City, and in recent months this crisis has been getting attention. When many people think about homelessness, however, they don’t generally picture kids; more likely they think of a grown man huddled on the street alone. But there are tens of thousands of homeless children in the city — nearly 83,000 in the public school system last year. And where do those kids spend their days? At school.

Homeless students tend to be concentrated in particular schools, creating challenges that traditional schools aren’t set up to cope with. Many of these children are dealing with a level of stress that would strain even the strongest adult, and they bring that with them to class.

Image

A 5-year-old boy looks out the door of P.S. 188 while waiting for his father and two brothers. They are currently living in a shelter.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

My editor, Amy Virshup, and I decided to focus on one school with a very high population of these students to see what the challenges looked like day-to-day. We picked a school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, P.S. 188, where nearly half the kids are homeless, living either in shelters or in some other temporary situation.

The Times ran an incredible series a few years ago called “Invisible Child” about a girl in Brooklyn named Dasani who was homeless. So instead of focusing on the stories of homeless children at P.S. 188, we concentrated on how the teachers, administrators and other staff members managed this challenging situation.

Late last year, I started visiting. I tried to go fairly regularly (including twice while I was on maternity leave) until the school year was drawing to a close. I spent a lot of time sitting in tiny plastic chairs. I had lunch with a pair of teachers at a short classroom table. I sat on a bench with a staff member while she ate dumplings in the sun. I met people for breakfast or coffee. I asked them how they landed at that school and how they approached their jobs. And I spent time following around the principal, Suany Ramos.

Some principals get nervous around the press, and you can feel a strong element of performance in what you’re seeing in the school as a reporter. But Ms. Ramos was very open. She made it clear from our first meeting that I was welcome to come any time. If she got sick of my frequent visits she never let on.

Once in the building, I often headed to early elementary grade classrooms, and to one first-grade class in particular. Homeless students in New York City are disproportionately young, but small children are also most dependent on their families. You can appeal to eighth graders to get themselves to school on time, but first graders need mom or dad to drop them off.

During class time, I would often ask the kids what they were working on, or crouch down and chat with them a bit, but mostly I tried to fade into the background.

A photographer once told me that little kids are the best to photograph: They mug for you for a few minutes, but they lose interest pretty quickly — and then they’re oblivious to the boring grown-ups. It’s similar when you’re sitting quietly in their classroom.

Since the article ran, I’ve gotten lots of email saying how difficult it must have been to report a story on such a heart-wrenching topic.

It was, and it wasn’t.

There were always reminders about what these kids were facing. There was a boy with tousled curls who wrote to Santa Claus during class in December, asking for money to buy a home. Another boy, who was far behind his first-grade classmates, almost never came to school; when I did see him in class, he looked exhausted.

And yet, overall, the school was a nice place to be. The teachers generally wanted to be there. The principal was very committed. And the students, especially in the early elementary grades, were usually playful little kids like any others. They were curious and honest, and happy to be in class with their friends.

I often found myself looking forward to going to P.S. 188, to folding myself into those tiny plastic chairs. After the story ran, I was a little sad that I no longer had a reason to return.